An explorative analysis of driving factors and restraints leading the end-user behaviour in the German solar thermal energy market

Worldwide, in the EU and in Germany it will not be possible to meet the re-quirements for climate protection without increasing the use of renewable en-ergies. Due to the fact that heat has a huge share of the final energy consump-tion, e.g. in Germany 54.2 % (Deutsche Solarthermie Technologie Plattform, 2009), the targets can be only reached with an increased effort in reducing the heating energy consumption and an increased share of renewable energies in the heating sector. The solar thermal industry (STI) has the vision to provide 50 % of the low temperature heating demand with the help of solar thermal. To reach that goal, the STI needs to get out of a niche market straight into mass production. In this study the focus will lie on renewable energies in the solar thermal energy sector. To fasten the development of new technologies different promotion policies have already been implemented, e.g. the in 1996 implemented Market Incentive Program (MAP), the in 2009 established Re-newable Energies Heating Act (EEWärmeG) and bank loans with low interest rates offered by the KfW banking group (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau) are the most important measures in the field of solar thermal energy for domestic use. Although the German solar thermal market has grown significantly during the last years, there is still a huge potential for new installations which is not being used until today. Policies to fasten the market growth in the heating sec-tor are mainly focused on the end-user. Nevertheless the driving factors and restraints in their decision process are not sufficiently known. What is known is that there is a huge discrepancy between objective knowledge and action. The study explored the driving factors in the decision process on the investment level if private households. The intention is to find strategies and adapt the promotion policies to overcome this discrepancy mentioned above. A qualita-tive approach, conducting semi-structured interviews with private house own-ers by applying the problem centred interview (PCI) method according to Wit-zel (Witzel, 2010), served as the basis of the study. The analysis of the data was done according to Hopf (Hopf & Schmidt, 1993) and Kuckartz (Kuckartz, 2010), so that both, previously made assumption, realised as questions in a question catalogue, and newly evolving factors have been derived from the ma-terial. The transcription of the interviews and the data analysing procedure were done with the software MAXQDA10 and the transcription software f4.